No more slop: Perplexity makes its $200 AI browser free (www.businessinsider.com)

Perplexity announced that Comet, its AI-native browser that can summarize webpages, pull key details, and follow links on a user’s behalf, will be free worldwide (the product previously sat behind a $200/month tier). The free tier launches with rate limits; a $5/month Comet Plus add‑on will provide paid access to a bundle of publishers (CNN, The Washington Post, Fortune, LA Times, Condé Nast titles). Perplexity says it shares 80% of Comet Plus subscription revenue with publishers and frames the move as making higher-quality sources more accessible while fighting the flood of low-quality human and AI-generated “slop.” For the AI/ML community this is notable on multiple fronts: it democratizes an LLM-driven browsing experience that shifts information discovery and summarization from search-engine intermediaries into an assistant paradigm, and it tests new publisher revenue models tied to AI delivery. The announcement also escalates competition with legacy browsers (notably Chrome) that have been slower to integrate AI, while Perplexity navigates ongoing legal disputes with publishers over content usage. Technical implications include broader exposure for generative summarization agents, renewed scrutiny on training/data provenance and access controls (rate limits), and a practical experiment in how AI products can balance quality, legality, and distribution at scale.